Paid unemployment as a lifestyle option is no longer sustainable, says Janet Daley

Unemployment is a bad thing – presumably we are all agreed on that. It is bad for the individual, whose self-respect and personal potential are left to waste away. It is bad for society, because the unemployed are more likely to become alienated, unconstructive members of their communities. And it is bad for the economy in two senses: because people who are not working add to the cost of the welfare budget, and because they spend less, which causes the retail market to suffer. Indeed, it is a commonplace to regard mass long-term unemployment as a national tragedy and a testimony to the failure of the government.

So how to explain the trend in current political debate which implies that "having to look for work" is a form of punishment? I have lost count of the number of Labour leadership candidates/trade union officials/anti-poverty campaigners whose use of the phrase "being forced to look for work" (or the even more emotive "being forced into low-paid jobs") implies that this is the loser's option – getting a job, or making an effort to get one, is the last resort when you have failed to persuade the state to go on supporting you. Diane Abbott has actually described as "cruel" Iain Duncan Smith's suggestion that those council tenants who wish to move out of unemployment blackspots in order to find work should be helped to get housing in new locations.

Somehow, we seem to have lost touch with the idea that being self-supporting and responsible for your own subsistence is the normal condition of adult life: you may have difficult times in which this is not possible, but they should be seen as temporary – transitory circumstances which require a remedy so that the proper business of grown-up existence can resume.

The sad irony is that almost everyone actually still believes this. That is why unemployment is so demoralising, and why the long-term unemployed so often become clinically depressed. Whereupon they are diagnosed as having an incapacitating disability and given more welfare benefits, which makes it even harder for them to contemplate going from welfare to work: so the incapacity benefit payment for depression, which was brought on by their joblessness, serves to lock them into workless dependency even more definitively.

We are not only, in Arthur Laffer's phrase, "paying people to be poor", but even more disastrously, we are bribing people to remain depressed. There is something profoundly wrongheaded in the supposedly compassionate stance of the Left: talk about "protecting the poor" so easily slides into an assumption that we are dealing with a fixed, immutable section of the population who cannot be moved from their berth at the bottom of society, and for whom any encouragement or incentive to improve their circumstances is simply sadistic harassment.

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Of course, there are some people who are truly incapable of supporting themselves, or even of contributing to their own support – who are so incapacitated that there can be no question of their need to be looked after by society as a whole. But they are a very small proportion of the population. Even most of those with disabilities do not come into this category. Why else do we have laws that prohibit discrimination against the disabled in employment?

"Protection" is needed by those who genuinely cannot help themselves. For everyone else, we assume that there are remedies for their problems, or at least that it is right to make the effort to find some. We should not be discussing this in terms of fatalistic pity: there is nothing inherently pathetic about poverty or unemployment when they are seen as transient phases which will be left behind as soon as humanly possible.

Which brings me back to the refrain of self-serving Left-wing politicians and anti-poverty lobbyists on the wickedness of "forcing people into low-paid jobs". It is perfectly true that a great many people who leave welfare dependency to enter employment start out in low-wage jobs. But all the evidence – particularly from America, which has gone in for far more radical welfare reform measures than are being contemplated here – is that while a lot of people begin work in minimum-wage jobs, they do not stay in them for long. Once in employment, they move up the earnings ladder quite rapidly and the spaces below them are filled by newer recruits.

The world of work is a dynamic, organic thing in which few people need to remain stationary and new prospects present themselves which were previously unanticipated. A recession makes it harder, but if entrepreneurialism is really allowed to flourish by a government that believes in it, this logic will still prevail. Taking work of almost any kind is still the surest route up and out of poverty, although this natural process can be hindered by government policies designed to "protect the poor", such as tax credits, whose main effects are to subsidise low wages and to make people disinclined to move up the earnings scale for fear of losing their entitlement to the credits.

I took part in a conference on welfare reform last week organised by the think tank Reform, in which a succession of non-governmental organisations – charities, private sector agencies, voluntary bodies – offered a plethora of programmes for helping the long-term jobless, including those who had serious social disadvantages and disabilities, to find gainful employment. Many of them had been doing this sort of work on a local scale for years with considerable unsung success, and were now ready to respond to the call of a Government that was prepared to listen to their varied, pluralistic approaches.

There were inspiring case studies of individuals who had been guided through their myriad difficulties in the highly personalised way that is characteristic of dedicated community-based agencies. There could not be a more illuminating contrast between this attitude, which could be roughly summarised as "How can we get you out of this?", and the political rhetoric which says implicitly: "Why should you be hounded?"

Paid unemployment as a lifestyle option is no longer sustainable economically. But the best reason for removing it is that it breeds defeatism and despair. Pretty much everyone – of every political persuasion – accepts that. The next step is to admit that the inertia and despondency that it creates are part of our greater economic problem, which is going to require the mobilisation of every human resource available to the country if it is to be solved.